I suspect a lot of the appeal is to people who prefer to keep their hands on the keyboard as much as possible. Being able to precisely position a window on the

I suspect a lot of the appeal is to people who prefer to keep their hands on the keyboard as much as possible. Being able to precisely position a window on the screen is possible to do without touching the mouse, but in practice doing so is very clumsy. By removing the "freedom" to precisely position windows and replacing it with a limited number of slots a window can go into, a tiling manager is more keyboard-friendly -- it's much easier to express "put this window in the upper right corner of the screen" in a few keystrokes than it is to express "put this window at these precise X and Y coordinates." Combine that with multiple desktops, which can also be switched between with a couple of keystrokes, and you get an environment that's very easy to "drive" without taking your hands off the keyboard.